CALGARY — Glen files out of the Uptown Bottle Depot, with his giant plastic tub fixed onto an empty stroller frame and $80 from three days of working the laneways in Bankview. After his disability benefits cover rent and some food, this is money for his tobacco and cat food for his six pets.

A Drop-In Centre shelter resident walks in with a bag of mostly Bow Valley Lager empties, and emerges with $2.05 toward his next six-pack.

Next door sits a new building, sleek and glassy on every side but the windowless edge facing the depot. Inside, tidily dressed reps sell units for the stylish 31-storey condo tower will soon rise on that site, whose developer aspires to lead a high-end transformation of that stretch of 10th Avenue S.W.

The venerable linchpin of the bottle-pickers’ economy next to the latest symbol of Calgary’s gentrification and inner-city renaissance: Can two such unlikely next-door neighbours last?

The depot’s landowner doesn’t see why not, with a 10-year lease good until 2020 with a rent adjustment in 2015, when the highrise named 6th and 10th is set to open. Moving it elsewhere in the core would be extremely difficult in a city where new communities greet new bottle depots with the same unease as a halfway house or drug addiction treatment centre.

But to Brad Lamb, the condo project’s Toronto developer, the progress he’s helping bring is a wave that will dislodge the lower-end business next door.

“People can’t be so narrow-minded to believe that a business that makes its money from redeeming bottles is going to have the economic strength to stay in an area where there’s a $100-million building going in next door, there’s a $100-million office building going one block east, and there’s about a $1-billion development across the street,” Lamb said.

“Of course the sheer pressure of humanity is going to force that to go.”

He’s asked about buying the bottle centre, but Lamb said the price was prohibitive. He said condo dwellers will have to decide whether they’re OK living for at least a while next to an ultimately safe and benign facility.

Inside the 6th and 10th sales centre, however, some would-be buyers are told a different story.

Depot owner Mitch Gagne said at least two customers have come in from the showroom saying the bottle depot “won’t be here for too long.”

“I just find it strange that their salesman would say something like that to potential customers when it’s not even true,” he said.

This Herald reporter, posing as a curious customer, visited the office late last month to hear the pitch himself. A rep cautioned she couldn’t say for sure whether the depot was leaving, but urged me not to worry.

“My knowledge of the neighbourhood (is) I know that nobody wants them there and neither do the people that own it,” the agent said.

They can say what they want, remarked Dave Custer, the depot property’s co-owner who ran the facility for more than two decades.

“We have no problem with the bottle depot being there. We fully intend to honour the lease, and for that matter we’d probably look at an extension,” Custer said.

Told about what the Herald heard, Lamb said what reps were instructed to say — and what she probably meant to say — is that in areas of transition, things like the bottle depot won’t survive economically.

“We’ve told them very clearly what can they talk about,” the developer said. “I think sometimes it’s possible sales people say more than they should.

“The reality of the situation is, I can virtually guarantee you that bottle depot’s going to be gone eventually.”

On that point, Custer can’t say never. If a lucrative enough offer does come, he’d be open to it. “He could very well be right,” he said of Lamb.

The landowners were close to selling during last decade’s boom, Custer admitted. But there wasn’t any place for one of Alberta’s busiest bottle return facilities to move in the downtown area, so the depot stayed.

“This location is so ideal,” Gagne said.

Unless council authorizes an exception, a bottle depots are mainly in industrial areas or on some major roads.

“Ideally, industrial uses would be in industrial areas, but still convenient to residential so that one can bring in their recyclables,” said the Beltline’s Ald. John Mar.

“The industrial nature of it eventually will be phased out of the downtown, whether it be five years or 10 or 20, I do see that eventually switching out.

“I don’t know if I would call it incompatible, but I would say it’s an endangered species.”

The province’s Beverage Container Management Board mandates that no bottle drop-off can be located within three kilometres of another one. Since the Inglewood centre shut in 2009, the closest ones from the Uptown are the Moneyback Container Shack on 37th Street S.W. or another in Manchester industrial area.

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